malvasia bianca

My first impression of Imbroglio: lovely symmetry, with a fondness for twos and fours. The playing field is a four by four square, with monsters coming out of the four corners. You fight monsters with the weapons on the playing field; those weapons come in two colors, red and blue, doing one point of damage in its color. Each of the four corners has its own type of monster; two of the monster types are easier to defeat with red weapons, one having one red / four blue hit points and one having two red / three blue, while two are easier to defeat with blue weapons, with one blue / four red and one two blue / three red. (Whereas you have four red and four blue hit points, so you can deal with either color of monster.)

Of course, at some point games need to break symmetry. And, in fact, the monsters aren’t symmetric: three of the monsters do red damage, while only one (the two blue / three red one) does blue damage. And there are so many weapons that symmetry isn’t really an issue when talking about weapons: the weapons are instead more like a series of variations. (Sixteen weapons of each color, unsurprisingly.) The weapons all gain power by defeating enemies: each time a weapon defeats four enemies, it levels up (which it does a maximum of four times); on some of those level increases, weapons do more damage and/or gain extra powers.

There are broad groupings of weapons, however. The red weapons are a little more straightforward: they almost all do extra damage at some point in the level up sequence. In contrast, most of the blue weapons never do more than one damage: they’re instead themed with more magical effects. There’s also a “curse” mechanic that several of the blue weapons interact with: a few of them give curses to monsters, and several of them have random effects against cursed monsters (e.g. blocking a percentage of hits, with the percentage increasing as the weapon levels up).

So a big part of the game is deciding what weapons you’re going to put on the board at the start of the game. If you’re in a cursey mood, then you need both curse sources and weapons that take advantage of curses. But if you’re in a mood to just bludgeon stuff to death, then a lot of red might make more sense. And, as you get more experienced with the game, you’ll play around with not just the weapon mix but the weapon placement: how you lay out red weapons versus blue weapons, how the corner with a blue monster affects things, where to put the ranged weapons (if you’re using any), etc.

There’s another factor that plays into the game, though: you have a choice of characters. (Initially, if I’m remembering correctly, three? Or four, probably given the game’s fondness for powers of two. At any rate, you unlock more characters as the game progresses.) Each character has a weakness (e.g. no ranged weapons, or only red weapons), along with a special power. Those special powers are activated by runes: you get one rune each time you level up a weapon (i.e. every four enemies the weapon defeats, stopping after four levels), and each characters has an ability that they can pay for via runes (e.g. heal yourself, or curse an enemy).

So the choice of character gives you an active encouragement (both because of their weakness and their strength) to explore a particular part of the weapon design space. Also, on a subtler note, the characters’ special powers are the only way to spend a turn without either moving or attacking, which affects the parity of the game state, switching from “this enemy will attack me before I attack them” to the other way around.

And the runes play into the rhythm of the game. There is an actual goal of the game: there’s a star on the level, and when you collect that star, you heal one red and one blue, the walls in the level change, and you get a point. When I started, I honestly didn’t worry about the points that much: I was focused on leveling up weapons, including killing enemies with weapons that I particularly wanted to level up next, and stars were a vehicle to stay alive, something to be actively pursued to maintain a health buffer but otherwise a bit more of a secondary goal.

It turns out, though: while I certainly support playing games in a way that ignores the game’s scoring system, going for stars really does make the game richer. It gives you a tradeoff that wouldn’t otherwise be there, and it makes you aware of how far you can go without focusing directly on leveling up. (And, as you take turns, the monsters come more frequently, and there are even a few new monsters that appear; so taking your time really does have a long-term cost.) The game progresses nicely from an early game where you can do almost anything you want, to a middle game where you really want to have made progress on leveling key weapons, to an end game where monsters are probably coming at you too fast for you to be able to handle but, if you’ve maxed out enough levels on the board, are thinking hard enough about the exact actions the monsters will take, and are lucky, then you’ll be able to make it through waves. (I think the monsters come in waves? I haven’t actually counted the monster spacing, though.) And runes play into this: you won’t use any runes in the early game, and only a few in the middle game, so you should have quite a lot going into the end game, until either you don’t or having them isn’t enough.

Quite a game, I’m very glad to have spent time with it, time exploring its various options and getting to know the contours of its symmetries and symmetry breaking.